On Wednesday Dr. Matecha’s Geochemistry class took a trip out to Killbuck Marsh to collect water samples for a research project. This week saw Ohio and Wooster especially inundated with heavy rain, which led to some very interesting conditions for the trip. From the first sampling site the class could tell they would have to get creative. Flooded roads weren’t a deterrent for this class though! They embraced the challenge with their mud boots. Dr. Matecha was contemplating whether the other sites would be accessible. Students used their resources to collect samples, even from some harder ..read more

In the summer of 2018 I traveled to Wales for a conference in Cardiff. Immediately afterwards I visited my dear fiends Caroline and Tim Palmer in Aberystwyth, and they gave me a tour of Welsh sites they found particularly interesting. It was a spectacular trip, and I learned and saw so much. One afternoon we visited a sixth century memorial stone in a field near the coastal village of Penbryn, western Wales. (The image above is from this site.) It is a micaceous ferruginous medium sandstone block about 1.4 meters high inscribed with “CORBALENGI IACIT ORDOVS”, which translates to: “Of Corbaleng ..read more

The conical fossil above on the cover of the latest issue of Palaeoworld is the paratype of Conchicolites parcecostatis, a new Ordovician (Katian) cornulitid species from the Korgesaare Formation, Sutlema quarry, Estonia. It is tiny, only about two millimeters long. This species, and another new one below, are now formally described and assessed by Vinn et al. (2024). I’m proud to have been on Olev Vinn‘s team for this project, which also included Ursula Toom (Tallinn University of Technology) and Anna Madison (Russian Academy of Sciences). Above is the paratype of the other new cornulitid spe ..read more

Readers of this blog will remember Kate Runciman, a 2022 graduate of The College of Wooster and now a graduate student at the University of Cambridge. Her Independent Study thesis (after peer review and revisions) has now been published in a conference volume from the 2022 meeting of the International Bryozoology Association (Runciman et al., 2023). She studied growth patterns within large trepostome bryozoan skeletons from the Cincinnati, Ohio, region. They are from various units in the exposed Upper Ordovician (Katian) rocks. The images above are from acetate peels, with the scale bars equal ..read more

I was very fortunate this semester to have such a fine class of paleoecologists. This course broadly covers the Earth’s ecological history, so it consists of principles, theories and processes illuminated with case studies, all strung along the thread of geological time. I thus depend on the students to bring in lots of questions and their own research on special topics. This class was brilliant with thee happy tasks. Part of the charm was how many disciplinary majors were represented, from the Earth Sciences through Archaeology and Biology. The above class photo was taken at the end of our la ..read more

This semester’s Geology of Energy Resources course, which focuses on how fossil fuels form, are extracted, and are used, had the opportunity to visit two unconventional oil and gas wells run by Ascent Resources located in southeastern Ohio this week. While most people in the Appalachian Basin think of the Marcellus Shale when it comes to natural gas, this area of Ohio targets the underlying Upper Ordovician Utica Shale. The trip started with an early morning drive from Wooster down to Salesville Ohio, to visit an unconventional well that was in the final stages of the drilling process. As the ..read more

Today was astonishingly beautiful in Ohio: bright blue skies and the peak of fall leaf colors. By happy circumstance, I had three Polish paleontologist friends visiting Wooster after the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh last week. Greg Wiles very generously drove us down to Caesar Creek State Park for a few hours of fossil collecting from Ordovician exposures in the emergency spillway of the lake. From the left the team consisted of Greg Wiles, me, Jakub Słowiński, and Michał Zatoń, the latter two from the Department of Palaeontology & Stratigraphy, University of ..read more

This summer Garrett Robertson and Minnie Pozefsky performed superb research on the sponges and diatoms in a core from Brown’s Lake near Shreve, Ohio. Their project is summarized here. Today Garrett presented their work, along with others on the NSF-funded team, at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Garrett is pictured above with the poster. (Thanks, Greg Wiles, for the image!) Minnie Pozeksky, shown above, specialized in the diatoms, mastering their taxonomy, paleoecology, and statistical distribution. She is now a first-year student at William ..read more

The distinguished paleontologist Dr. Julia Clarke visited our Paleoecology lab in Wooster yesterday. She was there as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. She was wonderful with her several fascinating talks and many interactions with our students. Everybody is happy in this picture for a reason. A very high point for Wooster paleontology and the other Earth sciences. Thank you Emily Armour for this image ..read more

The Fall 2023 Paleoecology class is continuing to work on its Upper Ordovician fossil collections from our field trip at the beginning of the semester. Part of the class is shown above sorting their specimens and identifying them as precisely as possible. The other class members are in the basement with the rock saw and grinders. It’s a real-world experience including preservation and taphonomy issues with the vagaries of some taxonomies. The students took ownership of the joys and dilemmas of paleontology from that first field day. Here are two trays in progress. Students are now using scraps ..read more